-Spending so much time building up Zodiark as the Ultimate God of Destruction that the Ascians were truly working towards all this time just to have you nonchalantly Kill God on the Moon less than a third of the way through the story

-Emet-Selch being such a charming fan favorite that they just made him a good guy after all (please god FF just give me some good villains again)

-The whole Elpis section was beautiful but didn't work for me since the Ascians have been the bad guys since day one and Shadowbringers made it explicitly clear that their ultimate goal is at least 14 separate world-spanning genocides. I'm not gonna think "I dunno maybe they do have a point" just because Elpis is a paradise and Emet-Selch is nice to you and Hythlodeus is a cute twink.

-The Blasphemies are just Lightwardens again

-The fact that Dynamis has always been swirling around in the aether since the beginning of time but the minute you learn about its existence, it starts turning people into monsters whenever they "give in to despair", which functionally just means "whenever narratively convenient" (though admittedly this does lead to the absolute best moment of the entire expansion when Matsya is running through Thavnair during the Final Days with the baby after watching his parents being murdered by a Blasphemy, frantically singing and praying as Dynamis starts pouring out of the both of them as the world just crumbles in flames around them. That moment of sheer hopeless melancholy really did sell me on how real shit had gotten)

-Building a spaceship to fly to the literal edge of the universe just to watch all of your party members have a Heroic Sacrifice competition that you know is just gonna be reversed in twenty minutes anyway is such an insane escalation that is so on-its-face meaningless that it made the entire last area a massive fucking slog

-The climax is so cartoonishly preposterous that it'll make every future expansion feel like a step down anyway because how in the hell can you go "bigger and better" than "Fighting for the fate of the literal universe while at the intersection of a thousand universal genocides and winning with the power of friendship"

-Insisting that Zenos is some sort of equal-and-opposite mirror of yourself and trying so very hard to make him your hot boy bishie anime rival after he was already flawless as a ruthless, bloodthirsty commander in Stormblood and I absolutely hate that the entire arc of Hydaelyn vs Zodiark that everything was secretly about all along (until the last four levels of quests where it turns out NecronMeteion is the real threat but still she's gonna end existence so why the bait and switch at all) all has to end with you and Zenos literally fist bumping at the edge of time

To be fair, we're told that the thing that was protecting Etheirys from Meteion's barrage of dynamis was the aether shield that Zodiark provided (since the Ascians were immune to it while their creations and other low-aether beings, like us, were not). Not only did it keep the planet powered, it also protected against the dynamis storm. Then, we just had to be big damn heroes and blow up Zodiark because Fandaniel was gonna use it to blow up the world, anyway. The prick. So yeah, people turning into Berserk monsters happened as we learned about dynamis because, as it turns out, beating up Zodiark around the same time was probably not the wisest idea.

You right. I completely forgot about that detail, lol. For as much as I love XIV (and all told Endwalker is still the second best expansion despite my complaints) the infodumps can be totally overwhelming at times and around the time the whole idea of needing crystals to summon Primals was just kinda dropped I admittedly stopped paying super close attention to the rules since they were obviously being written on the fly.